Anna Deavere Smith

Professor  ·  NYU Tisch

Anna Deavere Smith is an actress, playwright, teacher, and author credited with creating a new form of theater — one that combines the journalistic technique of interviewing subjects with the art of interpreting their words through performance. A pioneer of verbatim theater, she has created over fifteen one-person shows drawn from hundreds of interviews, including Twilight: Los Angeles, named one of the best plays of the last twenty-five years by The New York Times, and Fires in the Mirror, a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize. She served on President Biden’s Committee for Arts and Humanities, was Eastman Professor at Oxford University, and is a University Professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and founding director of the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue.